Abstract:
Emotional literacy, with love as the guiding emotion, is a undeniable
requirement for a healthy physical and psychological life. Transactional
analysis provides the concepts (strokes, the stroke economy) and advanced
techniques (Opening the Heart exercises) to teach people the essential skills
required to give and accept love.

Heart-centered
EQ. For
twenty years I have studied the emotions. I have identified a set of skills
which I have called "emotional literacy"; emotional intelligence with
a focus on love, intimacy and the common good.

As
a transactional analyst I am interested in people's everyday attempts to connect
with each other--at the grocery store or bank, in phone conversations and e-mail
letters, while making love or arguing, eating at a restaurant or driving ,
teaching or being taught, talking to accountants or to babies. The raw data of
this analysis is found in the constant stream of daily transactions between
people. The particular transactions that most interest me are the positive,
affectionate expressions of recognition which constitute the loving, intimate,
bonding experience.

Scientific
evidence strongly suggests that to maintain emotional and physical health we
have to know how to relate to each other in a caring way. The undeniable
evidence is that anger, anxiety and depression, on one hand, and love and
intimacy on the other, affect health and recovery from illness. This findings
have been elaborated by Dean Ornish MD in Love and Survival. The
Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy. (1997) He
writes:

“…love
and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well... I
am not aware of any factor in medicine -- not diet, not smoking, not stress, not
genetics, not drugs, not surgery—that has greaterimpact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death
from all causes.”

Yet,
caring (love to be blunt,) which is presumed to be based on a mammalian
instinct, strongly allied with survival is fraught with difficulties and is
becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in our culture. Hoping to counteract
these trends, I endeavor to teach people the simple, basic transactions that
constitute the loving experience. This practice is based on three concepts:
Strokes, The Stroke Economy and Opening the Heart.

Strokes.

Eric
Berne coined the term "stroke" to denote a unit of human recognition.
Based on the findings of Renee Spitz in his studies of "hospitalism"
Berne proposed that people need strokes to survive, much as they need food,
water and air. By introducing the concept of the stroke transaction--the
exchange of recognition-- he made it possible to observe and discuss the
exchange of affection or love, in fine textured detail.

The
Stroke Economy.

Puzzled
by the difficulties that people have when exchanging strokes I came upon Wilhelm
Reich’s concept of the "sex economy," which he defined as the
intentional squelching of sexual exchanges among German youth for the purpose of
promoting conformity to Nazi doctrine. I saw a similar inhibiting trend in our
culture, applied to simple affection and love, and called it the "stroke
economy."

The
stroke economy creates a scarcity of love and affection by imposing a set of
rules that govern the exchange of strokes.

The
rules of the stroke economy are:

Don’t
give strokes you would like to give.

Don’t
ask for strokes you would like to get.

Don’t
accept strokes you would like to accept.

Don’t
reject strokes you don’t want.

Don’t
give yourself strokes.

These
rules are enforced internally and externally. Internally, by what we, in
transactional analysis, call the Critical Parent. The Critical Parent is an ego
state and as such it represents a network of ideas, acquired in childhood which
deeply affect love of ourselves and others. These ideas include the rules of the
stroke economy and they can be seen as ingrained neural networks that shape
every emotional experience according to an archaic blueprint.

The
rules of the stroke economy are set down by restrictive social mores and
enforced by way of the social disapproval of those who violate them.
Disobedience to these rules results in painful feelings of guilt, shame and
unworthiness. As people--intimidated by these internal and external
sanctions--follow the stroke economy’s implicit rules on a culture-wide basis,
the outcome is a lowering of affectionate exchanges resulting in generalized
"stroke starvation".

Stroke
starved people, will become depressed and will resort to self-damaging
psychological “games” to obtain recognition. Just as starving people will
eat rotten food or people dying of thirst will drink salt water people are
willing to accept damaging toxic strokes when stroke hungry. Eventually, harmful
methods of obtaining strokes become habitual to stroke hungry people who know of
no other way of fulfilling their need for human recognition. (See The Warm Fuzzy Tale for a children's
story that illustrates this point)

The
end result is that our innate capacity for love and its attendant survival
benefits are increasingly unavailable to many. At the same time cultural
patterns of cynicism and loneliness are proliferating and standing as obstacles to
the recovery of our loving capacities and skills.

Opening
the Heart.

The
pressing question becomes: "How do we recover our capacity to love and how
do we develop our loving skills?"

In
their cutting edge book The General Theory of Love, (2000) Thomas Lewis
et all establish the limbic brain as the seat of the loving emotion. They write
about the genetic basis for the development of love and how in a child's
earliest days, when the capacity is developing, the child and the mother inhabit
an open system in which their limbic connections affect each other profoundly
creating a state called “limbic resonance.” This mutual modification is most
powerful for the young infant who is fully open to developing and setting down
patterns of loving.

While
loving patterns or bonding ties are set in childhood, later relationships in
which the person establishes a limbic resonance with another are capable of
restructuring a damaged bonding structure.(Bowlby,
1969). Lewis et al conclude that permanent beneficial restructuring of a
persons deeply ingrained limbic brain patterns is possible through long-term
individual psychotherapy with a therapist who, for all intents and purposes,
needs to be a paragon of limbic virtue.

I
arrived at similar conclusions by a very different path based largely on
intuition and trial and error as a teacher of transactional analysis,
"human potential" workshops. As a part of my teaching I devised a set
of transactional exercises which I initially called "Stroke City" and
which I have refined over the years and renamed "Opening the Heart."

The
exercise had the overt purpose of teaching transactional analysis while
defeating the stroke economy, helping people satisfy their stroke hunger and
teaching them how to obtain what they most want: to love and be loved. It
turned out, however, that the exercise noticeably restructures people's
experiences at a far more profound level than expected; frequently, workshops
participants left the experience with a dramatically enhanced, “oceanic”
loving feeling. From my experience over the last forty years I am convinced that
positive lasting effects in limbic patterns can be produced with sharply focused
group work that concentrates on loving transactional behavior and the
emotional consequences of it.

I
have encountered intense resistance to the notion that love can be taught not
only over long years of skilled psychotherapy, as proposed by Lewis et al
but by intense, short term transactional exercises that can be undertaken in an
everyday context.

Quite
simply, I encourage people in a group to personally defy the stroke economy by:

Giving
the strokes they want to give,

Asking
for and accepting strokes they want,

Rejecting
strokes they don’t want and

Giving
themselves strokes.

These
transactional exercises are practiced in an environment made scrupulously safe
of hostility or coercion by establishing a set of cooperative agreements
designed to produce a safe experience. A skilled trainer leads the exercises,
sees to it that agreements are kept and helps the group to analyze the
interactions, transaction by transaction. This and other emotional literacy
training techniques are explained in detail in Emotional Literacy: Intelligence with a Heart (Steiner 2003)

Lewis
et al write of "three neural faces of love"--limbic resonance,
limbic regulation and limbic restructuring-- which are the requirements for
bringing about the rehabilitation of the emotional losses of early life. All
three of these processes require a secure base provided in these training
groups; an atmosphere of trust and openness allowing participants the
opportunity to give and take love in a setting of limbic resonance which makes
"opening the heart" possible.

Practiced
over time, these exercises can actually transform people, making them more
capable of giving and receiving love; they represent an advanced technique for
rebuilding a person’s innate, instinctual loving capacities. Like a highly
sophisticated diet regime in which we learn what and how much to eat or not eat,
this stroke regime aims for similar healthy goals in our emotional lives. In
conjunction with a program that is aimed at neutralizing the influence of the
Critical Parent and the feelings of unworthiness that are so often associated
with stroke starvation, these exercises can transform the quality of a
person’s life of love and intimacy.

Conclusion

Very
likely the reader will wonder how the practice of a few transactional exercises
could possibly create genuine love in people’s hearts. I am not proposing some
sort of psychological alchemy that turns a few daily transactions into gold. In
my experience the loving experience is a powerful drive which will seek
satisfaction and what I am promising is that these five transactions—giving,
accepting, asking for strokes as well as giving oneself strokes and rejecting
strokes we don’t want, frequently practiced in safety with as many people as
possible--but with at least one other, willing and sympathetic person—will
release the love locked away, inside of us. Giving and receiving strokes will
lure open the prison gates, the rest is up to that irresistible power of human
nature: Love.

It
may be hard to believe, given the massive resistance and deeply ingrained
deficits which we encounter, that such a thing is possible without years of intense,
expert help. But love is like a coiled spring ready to expand if we find a way of
releasing it from its bonds and nurturing it as it grows.

Each
and every one of us can relearn to give and take love. By systematically opening
our hearts to one another in an environment of trust and safety we avail
ourselves of the possibilities of our full emotional potential. That is the aim
of emotional literacy training.

References

Goleman,
Daniel. Emotional Intelligence; Why it can Matter More Than IQ.
1995 New York. Bantam Books.